Boy given 30% chance to live at birth defies odds

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EUGENE, Ore. - On the second day of his life, Mateo Guerrero was given a 30 percent chance to live.

Now 4 years old, he has far surpassed any odds that doctors and family ever expected.

"It was the scariest, worst news that I had ever heard in my entire life," his mother Kayla recalled, "to go from being ecstatic, the best thing in the world that ever happened to hearing he's actually really sick and doesn't have much of a chance to survive. It was unimaginable."

Mateo was born with an extremely rare illness called Hirschsprung's Disease,B where the ganglion cells stop functioning in the bowel.

The Guerrero's were unaware of his illness until his second day of life when he wasn't eating, was vomiting and never passed a bowel movement.

He endured three different surgeries over his 71-day stay in the neonatal intensive care unit at Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield.

In one of the surgeries, Mateo had to have his entire colon and half of his small intestine removed.

In July, Mateo was chosen by the Children's Miracle Network to represent Oregon at a nationwide trip to Disneyworld and conference in D.C.

"We were told that he would be small and that he would be underdeveloped," his mother said, "but he's actually above average with all of his statistics, his height, his weight, and even his motor skills."